


Recovery

by White Aster (white_aster)



Category: XCOM (Video Games) & Related Fandoms
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Implied/Referenced Mind Control, Mercy Killing, Mind Meld, Recovery, Torture, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:54:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28143444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/white_aster/pseuds/White%20Aster
Summary: When a bit of random ADVENT tech goes haywire on a mission, Terminal and Verge get to know each other a whole lot better in the aftermath.  With board games.  (Gen, with possible Terminal/Verge in the epilogue.  Please see notes for more info on the tags.)
Relationships: Terminal (XCOM)/Verge (XCOM)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 5
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	1. Recovery

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kanadka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kanadka/gifts).



> I hope you like, Yuletide recipient! As requested, I tried to go heavy on the backstory and interactions between Verge and Terminal, and thank you oh so much because now I ship these two like no one's business. Also had some fun with Verge's mind reading and its attendant issues, as you'd mentioned you'd enjoy that. I tried to fit in little bits and pieces of other prompts here and there, where I could! There were plans to include more of them (this all started, honestly, with an idea about why Verge doesn't wear shoes), but as the core of the story evolved, I felt like I couldn't include everything without the plot becoming very lopsided and wandering.
> 
> Also, some fair warnings:  
> \- this got a little heavy toward the end, when Terminal started talking about her trauma, but hopefully the situation she found herself in, and the resulting trauma, feels canon-appropriate.  
> \- this is a story that is partly about recovery from the horrible things you do/see in war, and that's where the torture, mind control, and mercy killing tags come from. They do not refer to the main characters, but instead reference past events that I hope are not overly gratuitous. Still, because there is aftermath of torture depicted, I have left the "Graphic Descriptions of Violence" flag on.  
> \- Terminal curses under pressure. Kind of a lot.
> 
> (Also also, in case you are not familiar, Jenga is a game where you stack a tower of wooden blocks and then have to pull them out and stack them higher without knocking the tower over. [Like so!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5y-JlNOj9g)

"Heads up. I'm getting some weird readings on my end," Whisper said.

"Are we talking techy weird or like...elder gods from beyond space and time weird?" Terminal asked, toggling Spike's startup sequence as the APC pulled to a stop. "Because it's always techy weird, dude. I'm holding out for some real Lovecraftian tentacle action one of these days."

Unfortunately, she didn't hear Whisper's reply, if he gave one, because Spike's diagnostic threw a tiny electronic hissy fit when it got to his primary stabilizer module. "Not again! I thought we fixed that!" Terminal hissed under her breath, pulling up the GREMLIN's power system settings and fiddling with the output... _again_. 

_Come on, come on...there we go._

With only a few yellow "NEEDS ATTENTION" flags, Spike cleared his start-up and rose from his cradle next to her. Terminal squinted at him suspiciously as the others filed out of the APC. She'd really thought that stabilizer would be ok for one more mission, at least. _Guess I need to put some more exclamation points on my requisition form,_ she thought. Either that or she just needed to pass the hat and hit the scavenger markets. It wouldn't be the first time she and Patchwork had gone (or paid someone else to go) dumpster-diving for parts, and the last thing anyone wanted was for Spike to take a nosedive when he meant to dose them with medispray.

Terminal sighed, rising from her seat and pointing a finger at Spike's optics. "C'mon, man, get with the program. We've got a job to do."

Blueblood stuck his head back into the APC. "Everything ok?"

"Yeah, we're good," Terminal said, ducking out of the APC, keeping it between her and their target. _Hopefully...._

She watched Spike as he floated himself out behind her, half-listening to Whisper and Verge on the team channel going on about psionic resonance this and elerium that and blah blah, nothing they hadn't heard a million times when checking out smuggled ADVENT tech. 

Spike bobbled only slightly as he maneuvered. _Is he listing to the left...? ...No. Wait, yes?_ Terminal reached out to nudge him, watching him recover smoothly. _No. Definitely no._

She blew out a breath, leveled one last pointed finger at him, and checked around the APC's cover before jogging to crouch next to Verge against a low wall. Cherub started marking the warehouse's entrances, and Verge looked back at her, head tilting in question.

Terminal shrugged and shook her head. Spike hovered in his spot behind her shoulder. He was _not_ humming at too high a pitch. He was good. She was good. 

They were good.

Besides, this was a simple "arrest some random smugglers and secure the weird ADVENT tech they're messing with" raid. Probably wouldn't even need Spike. Everything would be fine.

\-------

Spoiler alert: everything was not fine.

\-------

Everything _started out_ fine. The breach went well: they took down two of the heaviest hitters (two mutons with shotguns dressed in the Shield gang's colors - probably hired muscle) and wounded one of several masked figures clustered around the glowing crate halfway across the floor. Two sectoids in street clothes and goggles had been surprised in the middle of messing with something in the crate, and instead of scattering they just crouched down, one of them still fishing in the crate with one hand. That was all Terminal processed before they plastered themselves into cover behind a rough line of box-handling machinery.

Verge made a hissing noise to Terminal's left. "Definitely psionic. And unstable. Painfully unstable."

A choked cry sounded from the other side of their cover, and as Terminal peeked through a gap in their cover, something in the sectoids' crate pulsed, the glow taking on the cold, pale light of burning elerium. The sectoid that had been reaching into the crate fell to their knees, keening, fingers clawing at their skull as they collapsed. Terminal couldn't see the other sectoid's face, but though they had a gun out, their body language was hunched, as if they were also in pain.

Verge hissed again, this time the long, rattling, sectoid vibration that he hardly ever pulled out. Terminal cut a look at him, and his eyes were closed, his hand out as if in warding, fingers wreathed in glowing purple.

"Hey. You ok?" Terminal asked. Not that she could do much of anything if this was some psionic mumbo jumbo, but still....

"I..am," Verge gritted out. He switched to the team channel. "Whisper, the device is a malfunctioning psionic net amplifier. Tell 31PD to clear the block, especially of any psions. Everyone, try to wrap this up quickly. I should avoid using my psionics--" He raised his gun, shoulders straightening against their cover. "--but I can fi--"

The smugglers finally sorted themselves out and started peppering the squad's cover with bullets. 

So much for the "what the hell is a psionic net amplifier?" question Terminal was going to ask. She peeked through their cover again. Sectoid 1 was still on the ground, not moving. Sectoid 2 looked about like Verge did, gamely firing at them but not looking happy about it. Everyone else, including her, seemed fine, though the glowing thingy's high whine set her teeth on edge. Was it some kind of sectoid-specific weapon? Could they target Verge with it? Too late to ask now, with bullets flying.

When she looked back, Verge had braced to fire over the top of the conveyor belt, and Terminal was just close enough that she could see the purple haze of psionic power swirling in his big black pupils and wisping out toward the perpetrators and their mysterious machine. Creepy. But he just gritted his teeth and started directing them to engage. "Terminal, flank left, engage and see if you can shut off the device. Cherub, flank right and concentrate on the sectoid - take him alive. Blueblood, cover fire. Go."

"Copy, covering." Blueblood started putting rounds downrange. Cherub moved slow but steady forward, calling for the perps to surrender. Terminal peeled off to the other side, returning fire when she had an opening, but mostly just moving forward. These guys really were outclassed now that they'd lost their muscle, and they looked like they knew it. As soon as Cherub's tranq dart took down the last sectoid, the rest of the perps fell back, then fell back more, obviously intent on running.

Cherub was asking if he should pursue when the device's glow turned into an arcing flash-strobe inside the crate. Terminal, looking straight at the thing less than ten feet away, gritted her teeth as the high whine dropped to a tooth-rattling bass that seemed to echo in her head.

_Oh, that can't be good._

Verge shouted, "Terminal, get--"

Another flash, then a _snap_ that made every hair on her body stand on end. The device's pitch climbed up again to "earsplitting", and Terminal fought the urge to drop her SMG and clap her hands over her ears. Someone grabbed her arm, pulling her back, and she went, falling to the ground just as her poor ears registered some other loud noise. 

At least that high-pitched whine had stopped.

Then, pain. Pain in her side. Bad pain. _Hit?_ flashed across her mind, but when she looked down, hands going to her side, there was nothing. It still hurt like hell, but her armor looked fine. 

Verge swerved into her line of sight, leaning down to put a hand on her shoulder. When she looked up at him, her gaze locked onto the piece of metal sticking out of his side, lodged between the plates of his armor. Yellow blood dribbled from the wound.

The ringing in her ears was still bad, and she'd lost track of where the perps were, but she had a wounded squadmate. "Heal 'em up!" She ordered Spike to scan and dose Verge, and it took her a second to realize that her GREMLIN wasn't responding, his status reading as "ERROR". She glanced around and saw him lying on his side on the floor a dozen feet away. He looked like he'd taken a hit, and his stabilizer was sputtering, only managing to rock him back and forth against the concrete. "Fuck. Whisper, are we clear? Whisper? I can't hear you, are we--"

"We are clear," Verge said. Oddly, though everything else was a muffled blur, she could hear him just fine. "31PD is pursuing and locking down our perimeter."

Good. Terminal holstered her gun, wincing as she straightened, her side screaming, but no, when she looked there was still nothing wrong with her. Maybe she'd pulled something, when she fell? She could deal with it later. The shard of metal sticking out of Verge's side was more important. She pulled on his arm gently. "Lie down."

Verge complied, hands moving, and she just knew that he was trying to get his vest off himself. "No, dumbass," she said, batting his hands away. "Let me." She reached into a pocket for a manual medijector and called in to 31-PD for a paramedic unit, and after that she was on autopilot, pulling off Verge's vest, assessing the wound, guesstimating the size of the small knife of metal jammed into his torso, stealing the paramedics' scanner when it showed up, reassessing, deciding she didn't like the way the thing was pointing at the organs around it, and then taking the shard out right there, rather than risking it doing more damage during transport.

"You're lucky," she said once he was bandaged up. She held up the jagged piece of metal. It wasn't that big, but sectoids didn't have a lot of room in their abdomens. "If this had gone straight in--" it would have sliced through a major artery and probaby cut his liver in half, she thought but didn't say. He'd have had minutes to live. _And here I would have been, with a malfunctioning GREMLIN. What if the perps hadn't fled? What if Verge had gone down where I couldn't get to him? What if I couldn't--_

Verge's hand nudged her knee. "These things happen."

 _Yeah, right. And they happen a lot more when you're a careless, impatient fuck-up, not thinking things through._ But she was not done here, and she could beat herself up later. She wrapped up the shard in an evidence bag, just in case the docs at the hospital needed it for anything. "Anyway, you're gonna have a badass scar."

"Just what I've always wanted," Verge deadpanned, but his mouth had relaxed. He was okay.

"Heh," Terminal said, smiling a little in relief.

Cherub had moved over to them, looking concerned. His lips were moving but Terminal still couldn't hear what he was saying. She shook her head and said so, asking him to grab Spike. He gave her a thumbs-up and ran to do just that, bless his little puppy heart. Blueblood was watching 31PD take possession of the two downed sectoids. Things were winding down. "All right, then," she said, waving over the stretcher that the paramedics had brought. "Let's go." 

Their detour to the hospital was mercifully short. Verge had his scans redone, his wound stitched up, and was given some prescriptions and orders for bedrest that Terminal knew he would probably ignore. While they were checking him, Terminal nabbed the next hybrid doc that walked by who didn't look too busy. Maybe it was a little racist, but she actually preferred hybrid doctors. They tended to have started out as ADVENT medics, but they were generally pretty chill and less likely to give her orders they both knew she wasn't going to follow. She explained, probably too loudly, about the explosion and the hearing loss.

The doc checked in both ears, confirming what Terminal had assumed: "Eardrums intact. Should go away in few days," the doc wrote on her pad in neat block letters, tilting it so Terminal could see. "Try to rest ears. Quiet rooms."

Terminal nodded and gave her a thumbs-up.

"Any other injuries?" the doc wrote/asked.

"N-oh, wait...." It didn't hurt anymore, but Terminal unbuckled her vest, looking down at her torso. It had been the right side, right? But her shirt and the skin under it looked whole. "Huh," she said, gliding a hand over the skin of her abdomen. "Never mind. Must have imagined it."

\-------

Thankfully, Terminal found she could mostly hear by the next morning, when they settled around the conference table for their after-action report on the warehouse raid. As Director Kelly connected to the vidcom, Terminal shook her finger at Verge. "Hey, buddy, aren't you supposed to be lying down?"

"Aren't you supposed to be in a quiet room?" Verge said, gingerly lowering himself into his chair.

"Huh? What? Can't hear you!" Terminal grinned as the Director's face resolved and the meeting started.

Blueblood reported on their perps from the night before: no surprises there except for the two sectoids that hadn't had records. From what Blueblood had dug up, their names were Brandon Sheer and Karla Voss. They'd worked for the same construction company, one of the dozens still hard at work reclaiming and refurbishing damaged sectors of City 31. Sheer had been a construction technician, and Voss had worked in logistics administration. "31PD says that they've both admitted to hatching a plan to sell that piece of tech. Evidently Sheer had found it when his team was evaluating an old ADVENT facility down on 16th and A. He hid it, then went to Voss to have her set up transport and a buyer. Voss said they were just starting it up to show the buyers it was functional when we waltzed in."

"What do we know about the device?" the Director asked, sipping from her coffee mug. "Verge, your report about it perked a few ears in XCOM, though I didn't get all the details of why."

"Yes." Verge sat up a little straighter, then winced and slumped back down a bit. "It was a psionic net amplifier. I have worked with them before. ADVENT deployed such devices for collective psionic actions, such as linking in new nodes on the psionic network, or mounting a particularly strong psionic defense or attack. Essentially, they link multiple psions together to perform tasks as a collective that they could not perform alone. Rather like I can pull beings into a neural network that enhances my abilities, psionic net amplifiers can create a neural network simply by being turned on around multiple psions. I recognized the...feel of it as soon as Voss activated it. I could also tell that it was damaged or miscalibrated, as it was...unusually painful. Likely it felt the same to Voss and Sheer."

Blueblood quirked a smile. "Voss said that when we showed up, she was trying to turn it off, but that it hurt so much she couldn't figure out how before she passed out."

"Why didn't it affect Sheer the same way?" the Director asked.

"Its effects are dependent on psionic skill and experience," Verge said. "If Sheer was low-psi, it might have been painful but bearable. If Voss was high-psi but not experienced in dealing with those kind of artificial nets, it could have overwhelmed her and she would not have been able to...tune it out, as I could."

The Director leaned forward toward the camera. "So you were in that net with the perp during the fight? Is that a security risk?"

Verge shook his head. "We were linked, but though I could feel Sheer, mine was the stronger mind, and he was not experienced with maneuvering within such nets. He would not have been able to glean anything more than surface thoughts before I shut him out. His death trauma could still have damaged me, however. If we run into such a situation again, that is worth keeping in mind."

"Aha, that's why you wanted _me_ to take him out," Cherub said.

"Yes. Killing him would have psionically damaged me and perhaps Voss, as well."

"See?" Cherub said, crossing his arms with a smug smile. "This is why I always take the tranq rounds."

Terminal rolled her eyes. Cherub always loaded tranq rounds because he was a softy who didn't like killing people. She rubbed her temple. She'd woken with a low-grade headache that had bloomed into a pulsing migraine right beside her left eye.

Director Kelly spoke up again. "XCOM has taken possession of the remains of the amplifier. We've got people working on it who know what these things can do. If there are more of them, we'll definitely get them out of circulation."

Verge nodded. "Good. Also...." He glanced over at Terminal. "There was another effect they, and you, should know about."

"Go ahead."

Verge looked over at Cherub and Blueblood. "It...involves private medical information. I would rather speak of it in private." 

"All right. Anything else, anyone? No? Okay, everyone dismissed."

Blueblood sighed and stood. "This is where we go pretend there's some walls blocking the sound in here, isn't it?"

Cherub grinned. "We could go get lunch!" 

Terminal stood as well, but Verge turned to her. "You should stay. This involves you as well."

"Huh? Oookay...," she said, sitting back down.

Once the other two had left, arguing still about where to order from, Verge continued, lowering his voice. "When the device overloaded, it sent out a metapsionic pulse before it went offline. Usually non-psions are unaffected by those, but this one was incredibly strong, and Terminal was very close to it. It had...side effects."

Terminal frowned, rubbing her temple absently. "What kind of side effects?"

"It...pulled you into the net with me and fused us there. We are still linked."

"What? Pffft, no, we're not." _I'd be able to feel that...right?_

"Yes, we are," Verge said, voice patient. "For instance.... You have a headache."

Her fingers curled away from her head. "Yeah, so?"

"It is not your headache. It is mine."

Terminal just stared at him for a long second. "You're shitting me."

Verge shook his head. "I am not. Think back to the warehouse. You could hear me, though you were temporarily deafened by the blast. You felt some of my pain from my wound, before I realized what had happened and blocked the link. It was because we are networked together."

Terminal squinted at him. "Ok. Yeah, ok, that pain in my side was..." The same side and placement as where he'd gotten hurt, she realized. And it'd gone away just as suddenly as it'd appeared.

Verge tilted a hand as if to say, "there you go". "We are still linked in a very unusual way. I've been trying to come up with a metaphor. It is as if we were both caught in some kind of nondestructive fire, or acid...our mental flesh has melded together."

Terminal pulled a face. "That's a terrible metaphor."

"But accurate. We are linked...our minds are very 'close' together."

"I don't feel anything, though!" Other than the headache.

"That is because I have erected...barriers between us. In the burn metaphor, they act like painkillers, keeping you from feeling the effects. If I ease back on them--"

_\--concern-embarrassment-fatigue-regret--_

Terminal's breath stuttered in her chest, feelings that were not her own pressing into her mind, and the burn in her side returning. She knew the emotions weren't her own because they felt...different. She didn't have words to describe why, to describe how they were textured wrong, how examining those emotions was like looking down at layers of unfamiliar clockwork, seeing the gear-feelings moving but knowing there were other mechanisms beneath, intricate and slightly fascinating, mechanisms etched with words, and if she focused on them hard enough she could--

\--something held her back, something that felt like a big fuzzy wall of concern that blocked her way. She shook her head, realizing she had leaned toward Verge without thinking. She looked at him and knew. He was the source of those thoughts and feelings, of that big fuzzy wall. And though just standing on the edge of his...of his thought-stream dizzied her, Verge was more adept, of course. He reached out again, and it was like a great river reaching out to steady her, like giant powerful hands cupping her shoulders.

Terminal swallowed, mouth gone dry, her hand tucked to her side again. "It's been like this since yesterday?"

"Yes. I erected the barriers as soon as I could because I...did not want to alarm you, until we were safe--"

_\--embarrassment-worry-shame--_

"--then we left the hospital separately, and you went straight home, and I...judged that things were stable and I could tell you this morning."

Terminal found herself frantically trying to remember everything she'd thought last night. 

A wave of reassurance appeared from nowhere before receding, along with the pain in her side. "With the barriers erected and me well-rested, I was not able to read you last night," Verge assured her. "Things are only starting to leak now because I am getting tired."

"Let me get this straight." Terminal nearly jumped at Director Kelly's voice. She'd honestly forgotten that anyone else was listening. "So the device's malfunction has...psionically damaged the two of you and melded your minds together."

"Yes," Verge said.

"What does that mean, practically? Are you reading each others' thoughts?"

Verge considered. "Hmm.... Another imperfect metaphor: we are both transmitting and receiving psionic information through the link. I have more control and experience, so I am able to block that information from others and prevent myself from transmitting, to erect the barriers that I just described. Unfortunately, not being psionically gifted, Terminal has no way to do the same, on her end. Our privacy is thus dependent on me maintaining those barriers. I am doing that now, and it is...adequate, though not foolproof, and it slips if I lose focus on it."

"And without those barriers?" the Director asked.

"Without it, we both hear everything the other is transmitting. My...reception is better than Terminal's, so it is harder for me to ignore and easier for me to interpret what I hear. I can try not to read her, but it's very difficult while we are linked this way. It's like trying not to listen to someone talking a foot away. I have maintained the barriers since the event--"

 _What, since yesterday?_ Terminal's brow furrowed as she remembered the fatigue she'd felt from him. _Did he sleep at all last night?_

"--but as I said, it requires focus, and I am tiring."

A spike of _\--dread-fear--_ made Terminal nearly jump.

Verge, though, looked calm. "When things slip through, it is absolutely an invasion of her privacy and a violation of the Accords on psionic use."

"An involuntary one," the Director said, waving a hand, "so let's set that aside for now. Terminal, are you in pain?"

Terminal was focused on the weird sensation of relief that was washing through her, but she shook her head, trying to focus. "I'm...no. I mean...I'm getting little bits and pieces of what he's feeling, but it's...confusing more than anything. I can tell it's him and not me, but it's like having an extra...body to keep track of." She blew out a breath. "It's hard to explain, but it doesn't hurt."

It didn't. It was just...unsettling. She hated being helpless, and even that brief look at Verge's mind had her 100% sure that yes, she was a kitten being herded around by a mama panther, as far as this link thing went. Which was not ideal. She'd rather not have to rely on someone else, but.... She remembered that spike of fear. Verge was afraid of something, afraid that they'd...get in trouble? Or that he'd get in trouble? She didn't want that. He was doing his best, she was sure of that. "--it's...uh...it's ok. I'm ok. And I can tell he's being...polite. But how long is this gonna last? Please don't say forever."

"Not forever," Verge reassured her. "I know how to dissolve the link. To go back to the metaphor, I need to perform psionic surgery on us, to tease apart what is you and what is me, restore proper function, heal over our mental skin to create new natural barriers--"

Terminal shuddered. "Worst. Metaphor. Ever."

"--but I am not sure how long it will take. Days, perhaps. It shouldn't be painful, but I will need to leave our link open in order to do it, so I can...see what I am doing, in essence."

"Will there be any lasting side effects?" the Director asked.

Verge shook his head. "I do not think so, if I do this correctly."

 _If you do this correctly? Better and better._ Terminal laid a hand over her face. She felt like she deserved a facepalm, at this point.

"And you feel qualified to do this procedure?" the Director asked, looking at him hard.

"I do," Verge said, and the confidence in his voice was reassuring. "I have worked with such links before. I know their structure." He hesitated, and...something...something that made Terminal's stomach feel like it was bottoming out a bit...slid across the link, then vanished before she could identify it. "I have had particular experience with close sectoid/human links. I doubt you would find anyone more qualified to solve this problem."

 _Oh,_ Terminal thought. That conversation they'd had, about controlling those scientists. Right.

The Director sounded like _she_ dearly needed a facepalm. "So, you leave your link open, leaving you two...communicating...for as long as the surgery takes. That's the only way to deal with this? It won't go away on its own?"

"No." Verge shifted, carefully. "The wound has...already healed, in a way. New pathways have been formed. Information is flowing along those pathways, and I cannot keep up the barriers forever. Those pathways need to be found and severed. It is an active process, requiring us to both be aware and open to each other. It won't occur on its own." He looked over at Terminal. "I'm sorry."

Terminal waved vaguely. She wanted to reassure him that it was ok, but the whole situation was kind of messed up, so...yeah.

Director Kelly pursed her lips for a moment, then said, "Terminal, you're the medic here, and it sounds like you'll be the one at a disadvantage. I'll leave the call up to you."

"Me?" Terminal tossed up her hands. "Let's do it, I guess? That's all I've got. Despite Verge's _utterly terrible_ metaphor, I have no idea how this works. But...." She looked up at him, cracking a grin. "He is my squadmate, and I trust him with my life."

Verge's lips relaxed a bit into a smile. Ah, she loved it when people remembered her callbacks, and Verge always remembered her callbacks.

Terminal heaved a sigh and sat back. "If he says this is the best way, then yeah, let's do it."

The Director looked at her for a long moment, but Terminal just shrugged. What else was she supposed to say?

A little ray of warm gratitude that wasn't hers leaked through the link as Verge said, "I appreciate your trust."

Terminal just snorted and crossed her arms. She didn't hand out that sort of trust to just anyone. None of them did.

There was a lot of blah blah after that, the Director using a lot of careful words about this being a "temporary medical issue" and thus why Terminal and Verge could handle it themselves instead of it getting kicked upstairs to...whoever dealt with psionic problems, Terminal guessed. (That was fine with her, as most of the XCOM psions she'd met were waaay creepier than Verge - she'd rather have Verge drive her body around doing the hula than let one of those crazy Templars at her head.) 

At the appropriate points Terminal and Verge nodded, and she could feel his mixture of relief and apprehension settling into her own belly next to her own, whenever the Director mentioned reporting any of this. It made Terminal wonder if there was some political crap that Verge was worried about. They wouldn't _really_ slap him with a violation of the Accords over this, would they? On the other hand, the sectoids always took a lot of stereotyped crap about being creepy mind-readers, that was for sure, and all the criminal sectoids using their powers to mind-control people absolutely did not help with that.

Still, in the end Kelly seemed fine with letting them work it out themselves. She made them cross their hearts and hope to die that if they needed help they'd ask and also that they'd rat on each other if anyone was peeking in anyone else's mental underwear drawer. They both pinky swore to that effect and then finally Kelly put them both on medical leave and turned them loose. 

When the vidscreen winked off, Terminal sighed, leaning forward to thump her head against the conference table. "I could be dealing with car crashes and heart attacks right now. A nice, easy paramedic job, dodging drunks and getting looked down on by ER staff, but noooooo, I had to take the job where stupid tech runners set off _psionic acid bombs_."

"I am sorry," Verge said, a warm trickle of regret washing over her. "I know this is...weird to you. I will try to be as respectful and quick as I can."

"Yeah, yeah, I know," she said as she stood. "Let me go console myself by telling everyone about how they have to cover my caseload while we deal with this. I'm sure seeing Zephyr's face when I dump that kidnapping investigation on her will make me feel better."

\-------

Since Chimera Squad had finally settled in and gotten their own places in the city, the barracks room was being used as storage, the bunks pushed against the far wall and the space mostly occupied by crates and boxes of office and emergency supplies.

Dusty as it was, the barracks was also one of the few enclosed and moderately private rooms in HQ, so when Verge wanted to start the "surgery", he and Terminal went there.

Terminal wiped her palms on her pants. "Okay. So, how do we do this?"

"You need do nothing," Verge said, sitting on one of the crates and gesturing for her to sit as well across from him. "I merely wanted you to have a private space to deal with any side effects. I am not sure what this will feel like to you."

"Side effects. Right." That was not reassuring. Terminal sat, made a face, and shifted over so a bump in the crate's top wasn't poking her in the tailbone. "Will it be like what you did before, in the conference room?"

"Likely yes, though possibly more intense."

"All right. Do your thing."

Verge did his thing. Familiar purple energy gathered around his forehead, spreading down to his eyes and reaching out to her. Terminal closed her eyes but gave herself a pat on the back for not flinching. Usually those purple wisp things coming at her meant nothing good.

This time, though, instead of the mental claws of an enemy's mind control, Verge did something that felt like laying a warm hand on..or in?...her brain. Or maybe tossing a warm net over her brain? Little of column A, little of column B? It felt weird, but not painful. She cracked her eyes open and saw Verge watching her carefully. She nodded at him. So far so good.

The warm hand...moved through...massaged?...dissolved in?...her mind. She didn't have the right words for it, but then suddenly she did, the word _hassinanshaa_ suddenly just there. She knew what it meant, knew that it was a sectoid--no, she also suddenly knew, they called themselves Hsin before they'd taken on the human term--word for the particular mental work Verge was doing, for the kind of link he was building/opening. Having that knowledge was like falling down a hole, like her brain was sliding down a path of least resistance or a slick rope, and suddenly other words were on the tip of her tongue, sibilant words to describe different types and tones and flavors of thoughts, fleeting concepts flowing just outside her perception like a movie in her peripheral vision, and she realized--

_Yes. You are perceiving my thoughts, indirectly. Terminal?_

_\--focused attention-concern-worry--_

_Terminal, open your eyes._

She'd forgotten she'd closed them. Terminal blinked her eyes open and took a deep breath, feeling like she'd just woken up from a dream.

"Good," Verge said aloud. The purple had settled deep in his big dark eyes, then faded to wisps that only teased the edge of Terminal's vision now and then. "Try to ground yourself in your body. Feel physical things, concentrate on your vision or other senses. It will help you ignore what I am doing."

"That is super weird," she said, flexing one hand open and closed, the other gripping the cold metal of the crate's edge because yes, that helped.

 _\--reassurance-calm-acceptance--_ "I am not surprised. Let me try a few things. Tell me if you need me to stop."

"O...kay." The unknown of it, that she didn't know what he might do that she might need him to stop, was really annoying. But...this was Verge. They'd been through shit together.

 _Yes, we have._ She could hear it clearly, though Verge's mouth wasn't moving. _I have you, Terminal. You are safe._

It wasn't the same as someone trying to tell you something to convince you. She heard the words and felt his sincerity, his surety, at the same time. It was like he was telling her that he'd pick up lunch today - she believed him, because there was no reason to doubt him.

Mmm. Lunch. She was getting hungry. That was another thing to concentrate on, she guessed.

Something...twanged in her mind. Painlessly, but it was there, as Verge's warm mind-net combed through her...not her thoughts, but more like through the--

_\--aabansseh--_

\--the-paths-the-thoughts-went-through?...gently nudging things around. She tried concentrating on where the twanging had come from and felt the rope-fall into complicated knowledge starting again. She dug her nails into her palms. _Nope, nope, nope, lunch! Man, I want barbecue. Enid's, with that sweet sauce and--_ The ropeslide stopped as she thought very hard about food.

Something occurred to her, as the minutes stretched on and she became rather oddly focused on how her stream of consciousness was trending. "Does it bother you?" she asked.

 _\--distracted curiosity--_ "Does what bother me?"

"That I'm thinking about food you can't eat. I mean, does it sound disgusting to you?"

Verge shrugged. "I do not mind. Your thoughts are...flavored, if you will, with your own value judgments. I perceive the taste as you would. It's educational." His lips quirked, his eyes relaxing a bit. "Though I have to say, you are making me sad that I can't eat it myself." 

Verge stayed physically where he was, but she felt him psychically pull back a bit, or maybe just slow what he was doing. "This is all right? This level of link is comfortable for you?"

"Uh...yeah? I think? I feel a bit like I'm walking a tightrope over a river or something, but..." Terminal opened and closed her hands, rubbing them together to feel the warmth. It was chilly in here. "Yeah. I'm ok now."

"Good." Verge turned a hand up, gesturing. "I want to assure you, this is not dangerous. Your river metaphor is a good one. Another mind can feel like that, if you are not adept at navigating a link. But I will not let you get lost in my thoughts. I am always here to steady you. And though the volume of my thoughts might be confusing and uncomfortable, they cannot harm you."

She nodded, relieved a bit at how sure he sounded and felt. "So there's a river, but I can't drown."

"Exactly. You would just need to wait for me to pull you out."

Her lips quirked, her mind going back to the mama panther metaphor. Tiny Terminal, pouting and dripping as Verge's big pink hairless panther pulled her out of the river by the nape of her neck. 

Verge must have caught that, as he gave a soft, "ha!" chuckle.

Terminal smiled. This wasn't so bad. "Okay. Good to know. So...how long is this gonna take?"

Verge sighed, one long finger pressing between his eyes, and she got an echoed pulse of pain behind her eyes. "Awhile. Now that I've examined the link, I can see how entangled we are. It will take two or three days of effort, likely."

Terminal took a deep breath, blowing it out as her shoulders sagged. She suppressed the whine, but Verge's lips twitched anyway. "I will be as quick as I can."

"Hey, careful over quick," she said, wagging a finger at him. "I don't want to come out of this a vegetarian."

"That...is not how it works, don't worry." Verge tilted his head to the side, obviously contemplating. "We could likely speed it up if we put in a little overtime."

Terminal, who cultivated a deep and abiding allergy to overtime, squinted at him. "What do you mean?"

"It will not be hard work so much as...spending more concentrated time together." He considered, and Terminal got a complicated impression of a low background hum and steady, tedious work that she didn't completely understand. "If I am able to work on the process for 12 hours or more per day, it will speed things up. Eliminating downtime, if you will."

Something occurred to her. "Wait, can...can you do this from a distance? I mean, are we going home tonight or--" She rolled her hands in the air to indicate...she wasn't sure what. Uncertainty, maybe.

Verge shook his head. "My range isn't much more than a block. We would have to stop and pick up in the morning."

"Ugh." She trusted Verge and all, but she still wanted this wrapped up as soon as possible and sensed that Verge felt the same way. She found herself looking at the bunks. "What if we just stayed here? You know, hop right to sleep, then right back at it in the morning? I've still got a go bag here."

"As do I." Verge nodded. "That would probably be most efficient."

"You...good with that?" she asked. "I mean, you're doing most of the work here, buddy."

He waved a hand. "I am fine. It is not difficult work, it is just limited by my ability to focus. A few long days and a headache are a small price to pay."

She got the distinct impression that he was minimizing the amount of strain this was on him, but though she frowned at him hard, he just shrugged, not mentally budging from a feeling of _\--concentration-determination--_.

"Okay. I owe you some lunches, though." Terminal slid off the crate, stretching out her back. Ugh, she could already _feel_ that hard mattress. 

Heh, she could feel _Verge_ thinking about the hard mattress. Great minds and all that. 

A thought about the beds skated past her mind's eye, too complicated to read, until Verge said, "It's much better if you put several blankets underneath you."

Terminal looked over at the bunks, now stripped, but the sheets and stuff had to be around here somewhere. She envisioned sleeping like a queen on like five blankets and said, "Verge, I like the way you think."

 _\--amusement-connection-satisfaction--_ "Fortunate, under the circumstances."

"Ha! Okay, well, you think about...thinking...and I'm gonna go find where we put the pillows." She rubbed her hands together. "And is it just me, or is it fricking freezing in here?"

"It is cold," Verge agreed, looking out the windows set high in the wall. "I believe it is going to snow tonight."

\-------

Just as Terminal declared the sheets and blankets "funky" and balled them up to take to the ancient washing machine, Cherub poked his head in and asked if they wanted delivery for lunch. Terminal eagerly ordered no less than three kinds of barbecued meat, and Verge ordered something that sectoids called _mek_. 

They puttered about in the bunk room until the food came. By unspoken agreement, they pulled out the old folding table and chairs that were leaning against the wall, and Terminal settled in with a few datapads she'd been meaning to read. Verge reminded her that she could do whatever she liked while he worked and that she didn't need to necessarily stay with him, but she just shrugged. She still couldn't totally hear great, so shooting the shit with anyone but Verge was less fun than usual. Zephyr and Claymore were watching her cases temporarily, and Patchwork was working on repairing Spike, so really, there wasn't much else she could do. Honestly, it just felt better to stick near Verge.

Especially since she could feel him "working". And the headache they were apparently sharing was getting worse. The quiet of the bunk room was preferable to the muffled noise of the common area, especially as the assembly clacked to life.

Once the food came, Terminal found herself stopping in the middle of reaching for a french fry, her mouth watering over something that was neither french fries nor honey barbecue sauce. "Is that...." She closed her eyes, trying to concentrate on what she was tasting. She "slid" a little in the stream of thoughts under her mind's feet but was able to pick out one thing from the rush of mental sound coming from Verge. Her eyes snapped open, going to the _mek_ , a green-brown pile of veggies on a bun. "...oh man, is that what that tastes like? That's...that's actually good."

Verge sucked in a last bit of stringy green and swallowed. "It is what it tastes like to me."

"Can I...try some?" It smelled like a cross between sauerkraut and day-old garbage, but evidently it tasted really good? Terminal had the feeling she was going to regret this but was curious anyway. 

Verge shrugged, tilting the sandwich so she could get at the uneaten side of it. "You may. It's not toxic to humans. Though I'd warn you that it might not--" 

Terminal had already finagled a bit of green stuff out of the side of the bun with her fork and popped it in her mouth. A second later, she gagged and spit it back out again into her plate. "OH GOD YEACH."

"--taste the same to you as it does to me," Verge finished, taking another bite of his own.

Terminal downed the rest of her soda in an attempt to get the taste of rotten seaweed doused in lip-puckering vinegar out of her mouth. The sensory impression of it fought with the still-delicious umami flavor that was what Verge was experiencing. " _How._ " She gestured indistinctly between the _mek_ , her, and him.

"My tastebuds and yours register things differently?" Verge suggested, still chewing.

"I regret all my choices," Terminal declared, heading out to the fridge to get another soda. She grabbed her coat while she was at it. She was freezing.

\-------

The day passed, and despite the occasional random tickles and stretches and twangs in her brain, Terminal was able to concentrate more than she'd thought possible, several details from a case she was working falling together with the criminal history she'd pulled about the Corpalis gang leaders. She sent the info to Zephyr, who an hour later sent back a terse, "You might be right." Knowing Zephyr, that was a vote of confidence, so Terminal celebrated with a walk to the kitchen to dig into the candy bar stash. She came back with two, tossed one to Verge, and they both were halfway through them before she realized that she didn't know how she'd known he wanted one. 

Around quitting time, most of the squad came by to say goodbye. Godmother gave them a searching look and asked if everything was all right. When they assured her it was, she narrowed her eyes at them, but nodded. Blueblood gave them an update on the hilarious highlight reel of how Voss and Sheer were taking turns blaming each other for whose idea the tech runner scheme was. Whisper and Axiom and Claymore waved as they walked out. Patchwork sent Terminal a long email update on Spike. Zephyr stuck her head in just long enough to say to Terminal, "You were right. Don't pat yourself on the back too hard." 

Cherub--already bundled up to leave and looking utterly adorable in his rainbow knitted hat that Terminal absolutely needed to steal someday--let them know that the temperature outside had dropped to well below freezing, so the ancient heating system was going to have trouble keeping it any warmer than the "chilly" it was currently managing. "You guys sure you'll be ok in here?" he asked, frowning.

Verge waved a hand and Terminal pffffted. "Dude, we have like TEN blankets. I'm gonna be the filling in a blanket burrito. It's fine."

"Okay, well, good! Hope uh...." He lowered his voice to a not-at-all soft whisper. "Hope the thing is going well?"

Terminal shook her head. "Dude. You are so bad at confidentiality. Seriously."

"Hey, I worry!"

"We are fine, Cherub, and yes, things are going well," Verge said, hands tucked into his coat pockets.

Cherub grinned. "Great. G'night!" A wave, a slam of the door, and he was gone. A few more moments and the whole HQ had gone very quiet.

"So," Terminal said later, as they returned to the barracks with their dinners. The smell of reheated _mek_ was deeply conflicting to her. "You want to take a break, or...?" She tried to unobtrusively rub the bridge of her nose, where pain had started to pulse again.

"Apologies," Verge said, and something...slid...in between them, and the headache eased. Terminal opened her mouth to say that hey, maybe a few hours less of their link wasn't worth _him_ hurting, either, but Verge just smiled and said, "Actually, I had an idea for the evening that might be both fun and useful."

"O...kay?" Terminal said, something in the impish amusement she was reading off him making her frown as he rooted in one of the storage closets and came up with what she recognized as the "game box". That made her smile a bit, remembering evenings where a poker or board game got pulled out during the squad's off-hours those first few months in City 31. 

Then she saw what Verge had pulled out of the box and groaned.

"Jenga?" Terminal said, eyebrow raised. "Seriously?"

"Yes," Verge said, walking back over to the card table and pulling wooden pieces out of the box. He stacked them with a level of manual dexterity that was, frankly, ridiculous. "The 'surgery' process is akin to catching rogue signals of different types. Performing different tasks will increase the different types of signals and make the process go faster."

"... _Jenga?_ " Terminal repeated, even more deeply incredulous this time.

"Yes, Jenga." Verge started walking one of the pieces along the backs of his fingers, the fricking show-off. "It involves sequential planning, tactics, and spatial awareness. It's perfect for this, really."

Terminal narrowed her eyes at him. "Are you kidding me? Because I know you know that I suck _balls_ at Jenga."

"I am not joking. This will honestly help the process," Verge said, placing the final piece and sitting down, folding his fingers together in front of him. "And yes, I also know that you generally lose at this game."

"Uuugh, fine," Terminal said, flopping down in her chair and glaring at the tower of blocks.

"Also, you have to actually attempt to win for it to be useful."

"Uuuuuuuugh."

Verge liked playing this game quickly, so it didn't take very long before the tower teetered and fell. Terminal lost the first two games, but when she won the third, to no one's surprise, she suddenly became very invested and set herself to trying out different strategies. It was, dare she think it, fun, and she could feel Verge being amused at the same time she could feel him doing new things on the link between them. It was a new variety of weirdness in her head, but she just powered through, thinking about balance and weight and how they should probably move the next game to the crate, as that would be more stable than the dinky folding table.

Around the fourth game, as they set up a new stack on one of the crates, Verge said, "You're much more comfortable with this than I expected you would be."

Terminal knew, without asking, that he didn't mean Jenga. She shrugged. "It's neither of our faults."

"I know. I was never sure if your jokes about mind reading were just you making jokes or if they were jokes made to cover a serious concern. You do both."

She totally did both, Terminal acknowledged silently. She leaned down, trying to tell if the crate was even. "Verge, I trust you. I told you that."

"I know. But there is trust and then there is trust." He eyed the stack as well, then looked at her. "Other crate?"

"Other crate. You think we have a level around here?"

"I doubt it, but you could check the toolbox."

"Right." Terminal went over to the closet and hauled out the old toolbox they kept in there for odd jobs. She had to smile. They didn't need it so much anymore, but the tools had all gotten used a lot more when they'd moved into this dump. "No level," she pronounced, and they both shrugged, moving the wooden blocks over to a different crate that they eyeballed as being the most level. 

Verge picked up the conversation as if they'd never stopped it. "The rest of the squad trusts me as well, but some would be...more than discomfited by the idea of me inadvertently reading their thoughts, let alone handling their meta thoughtforms, even to help."

Terminal shrugged again. "I got nothing to hide."

Verge looked up at her. Which of course made Terminal think of things she had to hide. She immediately drowned them out with thoughts of puppies and kittens and how disgusting the _mek_ had tasted.

Verge busily stacked blocks. "Many find sectoids and our powers unsettling, whether they have things to hide or not. I am well aware that my race is perhaps the most hated after the Elders themselves."

She blinked. Wow, he'd just said that out loud. "All right, yeah, some people find it creepy. Ok, a lot of people find it creepy, but I thought we were leaving that behind us. You know. Working together, moving on and all that. We've all done things that we regretted during the war."

"...yes." Verge paused, and Terminal blinked through a few sensory images that came hard and fast, entire memories blooming in front of her mind's eye--

_\--walking down a long gray hall, past doors with ADVENT symbols on them, past videofeeds of humans in cells--_

_\--a human strapped down to a chair, purple waves of psionic power linking me to him, and his mind is mine, struggling but fading fast as I prune and mold, binding us together, giving myself control, until the two of us are in concert, and I will the human to open his eyes and he does--_

_\--a human woman on the other side of a glass partition, her hand pressed against the barrier, head dangling, and my own long-fingered hand reaching out to press over hers, my mind wrapped around hers, and I am just following orders, but it feels wrong wrong wrong, her pain pulsing through me, her untrained will pushing a shard of thought into my mind that burns in the shape of a question "--HOW DARE YOU WHAT GIVES YOU THE RIGHT WHAT--"_

_\--a dark room, lying on a hard bed and that question burning in my mind, what gives me the right?, and I know the answer to that, my superiors and the Elders have tasked me with this, but what gives them the right to order me to do this, and my thoughts tremble before an abyss of fear, fear, core-deep FEAR because just that question is blasphemy against the Elders, it will get me killed if anyone knows I even thought it, so I wall it off, bury it, harden my shields, HIDE--_

Terminal blinked her eyes open as she felt herself pushed back, steadied, and Verge said, "Apologies," his voice so calm compared to the emotion of the memories. 

The link narrowed suddenly down to almost nothing. It felt oddly quiet, after hearing him murmur in the back of her head all day.

She blinked some more, looking at the utterly placid expression Verge was wearing, which was so at odds with what she knew he was feeling. "Verge...you ok?"

"...yes," he said, closing his eyes. "Just give me a moment. They are not pleasant memories. I don't...want to inflict them on you."

She didn't know what to say. "It's okay" seemed trite and useless. Because obviously it hadn't been, and they'd had this conversation, about what he'd done and how he felt about it. Feeling him do it was so different than a brief, flippant conversation, though. Feeling him reaching into someone's thoughts, pleased with his work, pleased that he would be able to do what his leaders told him to do, and--

 _I will never do that again._ The thought was loud enough that it came through when nothing else was. _I would never do that to you._

"I know," she said. "Verge. Hey." She reached out, hand on his shoulder. "I _know_."

She closed her eyes, at a loss of how to do this right but nonetheless wanting to make him _believe_ her, so she pulled up every good memory she had of him and shoved them at him. How she always liked hearing he was going to be leading a mission, because he could find holes for them to slip through that she'd not even see herself. How his calm in the field reassured her, grounding her when things turned into chaos. 

And, bubbling up under that, a gut-level memory of being mind-controlled by a Gray Phoenix dominator, of already having shot Blueblood, of a red rage that wasn't her own drowning out her thoughts, and Verge's cool-breeze mind body-checking it right out of her head, giving her back her own arms and legs and hands so she could send Spike to treat Blueblood and then go about the business of shooting the shit out of the asshole that had used her to hurt her squad. 

"I trust you, you dumbass," she whispered. "You've earned it. You're always looking out for us. Knowing what you can do, knowing what you did, it doesn't change that. Hell, Axiom or Zephyr could crush my head like an egg, but I know they won't. Torque could turn me into a pile of poisoned goo, but she won't--" without some _serious_ provocation, at least "--and yeah, you could do bad shit, but you won't. That's not who you are. I _know_ that."

"...not who I am. I like that." Verge reached up, wrapping his long, dry, inhumanly warm fingers around hers. The rest of his reply wasn't even in words, just an overwhelming feeling of gratitude and affection that made her squirm. 

"Oh man, that's too mushy, right there."

Verge tilted his chin up. "It's not my fault you are a good person."

Oh that made her squirm for different reasons. "Ha. Ha ha. Ha. Oh, you don't know the half of it, buddy," she said, trying to make it sound like a joke.

It probably didn't work, but all Verge said was, "I know. But nonetheless."

Then he did something that felt like the mental equivalent of clearing his throat, squared the block stack between his hands, and gestured for Terminal to go first.

She was distracted all that game, though, trying not to think of...well. The amazing sideshow of failure that a simple compliment had brought up, evidently. Spike, and how her carelessness could have gotten Verge killed. The people who she hadn't gotten to fast enough, the ones she'd gotten to and couldn't save, the ones she'd gotten to and could have saved if she hadn't fucked up what she'd tried to do. The time they'd caught that wounded hybrid captain and--no. No. She was definitely not thinking about that.

Puppies. Adorable little puppies with fuzzy ears and big paws. 

She closed her eyes as the Jenga tower clattered down under her fingers, feeling fragile and hating it. She needed a better distraction. "Don't we have any other games we can play?"

Verge looked in the game box again, then held up a deck of cards, lips quirking. "Poker?"

"Ha, yeah, no, anything else?"

"Chess?"

"Oh hell, no."

"...State Your Business?"

"...is that that weird ADVENT version of Monopoly?"

"Yes."

"...all right, bring it." Surely it couldn't be worse than Jenga.

\-------

The snow began falling in big chunky flakes as they played. When Verge finally cemented his win over Terminal by raising her final property's Happiness Score the last needed point at 11pm, they both had a roaring headache that made even the underwhelming overhead lighting painful. 

"Okay. Dude. Uncle," Terminal said, resting her head in her arms. "Give us a rest."

"...Yes." Verge sat back in his chair, and she felt him pull away. It made some of the pressure behind her eyes ease, but oddly enough, it made her feel colder in a way that even a long hot shower and her five blankets could disperse.

Still, she'd not slept very well the night before, and she was asleep before her blanket burrito even properly warmed around her.

\-------

In retrospect, she should have expected the nightmare.

\-------

She knew the dream as soon as it started. It was familiar, like an old scar, and it always started with the sectopod. With the distinctive, skreeling metal sound it made as it moved. At first, it could have been anything, a bird cry or the bang of some piece of metal in the wind, but then it grew louder and louder, like it always did. 

She knew the color of the walls, the position of the furniture in Karen's exam room, the way Miko herself was putting supplies away in a low cabinet, the way Karen would turn from where she was disinfecting the exam table, the lines on her face deepening as she realized something was wrong. The way Karen would move to the window. And then the way the red light would grow and grow, and how Karen would throw a hand out behind her, yelling "Run--!" and then the red light flooding everything, heat and the snap of energy lancing through the wall, through Karen, through the floor, and only the angle of it saved Miko from being sublimated too, only sheer dumb luck sending her plunging through the destabilized floor instead, the building falling in after her, a wall coming down nearly on top of her, only stupid, idiot luck that she only broke a leg and not her head, and that the wall fell just so to hide and pin her instead of crushing her.

Lucky, lucky her, as she got to listen to everyone else in town die. To the sectopod crunching by, to it occasionally powering up and taking down another building in a roaring clatter of stone and metal. To the ADVENT troop carriers pulling into town. To dozens of boots moving house to house, methodical. To gunfire. Shouting. Human shouting, but also the ADVENT troops shouting in their jabber language. Shouting....

The dream turns in her mind like a snake, and she loses herself, and then she's back in the safehouse in Omaha, sweating in the August heat, trying not to listen to an ADVENT captain scream in the basement below her.

The door to the basement opens and Owen and Jack and Mia come up, all of them breathing hard and splashed with orange blood, but Owen's...Owen's got it all up to his elbows, and he walks to the sink to wash it off, and she can't watch that, doesn't know where to look at all. 

Her stomach clenches, but she reminds herself that it is an ADVENT captain's blood. He's the enemy, and she'd kill him if she had to. How...how was this any different? "Did he tell you anything?" she asks.

"Some," Jack said. "Few troop routes, but--"

"Not enough," Owen says, shaking off his hands into the sink, then leaning on it. He sighs, bone weary. "I wanted to keep you out of this. You're a good person, Miko, I don't...." He sighed, eyes closing. "We went at him pretty hard. Damn jabbers have bones like steel. He passed out. His pulse felt like it was going haywire. Take a look at him?" 

Her mind is going numb, her hands starting to shake. "You want me...to...?"

"We don't want him to die yet, Miko. The longer he lives, the more chance we've got to get info out of him. He's got to know more. He's running tactical ops out there, he's got to know more of their movements, plans...something. See what you can do for him. And then we'll try again." He turns away, and there are shadows over his face.

\--something skips like a vidfile badly spliced, and the next thing she knows she's down in the basement.

They've pulled him out of his armor, of course, but left him in the black bodysuit underneath. Despite the dark clothing and the single dim lightbulb and the darkness that crowds her vision, she can see the blood, on him, on the chair he's tied to, even if she doesn't know where it's all coming from. Her eyes are drawn to his arms and legs, obviously broken. Her medic's training takes over, ticking off injuries in her mind. Besides his limbs, they hit him in the head, too, he's got that weird orangey hybrid bruising on his skull, his face, which she...she would have told them not to do, that could be a concussion, that could kill him, and she doesn't even know what she's thinking, is she a _part_ of this? She knew what they were going to do, she didn't _stop_ it, so this is partially her fault, right?

_\--Terminal--_

Even without some kind of advanced scan, she can tell he's got to be in an incredible amount of pain, probably shock, probably concussion, and the...the deliberateness of it roils her stomach, it's worse than being on the battlefield, worse than anything she's seen before, and she knows anywhere she touches would be agony, and he's the enemy, she knows he's the enemy, and still she's just

_\--Terminal--_

standing there, frozen, and then he rouses with a small pained sound, raises his head and looks at her, and she's not seen them with their helmets off much, he looks alien and bald and pale, one eye swollen nearly shut but the other blue like Karen's and

_\--Terminal, you don't have to watch this, you--_

she says, "just tell them what they want to know, just tell them." and he winces, slumping and then groaning in pain, and he's whispering something but she can't hear what, there's a ringing muffle in her ears, but she knows he's saying he can't, he doesn't know anything else, just kill him, just let him die, and what's terrible is that she believes him

_\--Miko--_

she believes him but no one else does, and they're going to torture him again and it will be for nothing and

_\--Miko, don't do this to yourself---_

another skip, missed moments, but she's got her hands in her bag, an empty syringe in her fingers, and she pulls back on the plunger, filling it with air, and moves over and she has to hurt him to move him, to get at a vein where she can push and push and push the air into his bloodstream, enough for a heart attack, enough for a stroke, and

_\--Miko, shhhh--_

the dream dissolves, and she hangs somewhere warm and dark for a long moment before rising and

She woke gasping in the cold air, the wind howling outside, something...something metal banging around out there, on a rooftop, maybe, and she was sweating under several blankets and it was like summer in Omaha and suddenly she couldn't stand it. 

She fought out of the cocoon of the blankets, sitting up, and the cold bit at her fingers and toes and collarbones, but she sat there anyway, shaking.

"Fuck," she whispered.

She could feel Verge awake on one of the other bunks, and it was strange, the sense that he was there but not there, waiting, present, but not...too close.

"That was you?" she croaked, meaning the voice cutting in and out, the abrupt end of the dream, but of course he knew that.

"Yes," Verge replied from across the room, and she could tell she was hearing him with her head more than her ears. "I...woke to your nightmare and tried to intervene." 

"Sorry," she said. It was like he'd said, earlier...it was a bad memory. The worst. She wouldn't have chosen to inflict it on him. She'd have been happy if no one had ever known about it, ever. She'd have been happy to set it on fire and never remember it again.

What would he think of her?

Terminal started to shake for real from the cold. She pulled her feet up and tucked them back under the blankets. 

"I know you do not want to talk about this--" Verge said. 

_\--no, I do not, I really really do not--_

"--but I will repeat myself: you are a good person."

"Wh...what?" She started to laugh and it turned into something else, something ugly and blurred with the tears she was not leaking into her knees. "How can you say that?" 

_I killed a guy in cold blood. I murdered him, and sometimes I regret it and sometimes I don't. I didn't think it through, I wasn't thinking, I just... I just made a snap decision and sometimes I wish I'd just...just done what Owen wanted and let them...._

Owen had died before the summer was out, killed helping set up a new safe house. Mia had just never come back from a supply run, captured or killed, they'd figured. Jack had lasted the longest, a year or two, but then he'd died as well, shot by a trooper who saw him out after curfew and shot him in the back when he ran.

And she'd never know if maybe something that captain had known...something they hadn't gotten out of him yet...might have saved them. She'd never know if she'd just been a sucker for letting him off easy.

"I think you did the right thing." Movement in the dark, and then Verge was kneeling down beside her bunk, still wrapped in a blanket. "If it helps...any ADVENT captain that went off the grid for any reason would have been severed from the psionic network. It would have been traumatic, confusing, possibly psychologically damaging. They were only given what they needed to know for their mission, and not taught to think for themselves any more than absolutely necessary. Everything else was pushed from the network."

She sniffed hard, her head feeling fuzzy and too full. She turned her head to look at Verge. The dim light cutting down from the windows fell in bars across his face. "What does that mean?"

"It means that he likely would not have known much. The Elders designed them that way. To make them interchangeable. Disposable." 

That helped. It was just speculation, there was no way to _know_ , but it...it helped. Terminal squeezed her arms around her knees. "You think I did the right thing?"

"I do." Verge reached out, laying a warm hand on her arm, and mentally he did the same, glowing with admiration and understanding and support. "Even if he had known more...torture is wrong. What you did might have technically been murder, but it was also mercy. Mercy to an enemy, offered under the hardest of conditions."

She buried her face in her knees. She was crying, dammit. She hated crying. 

Owen and the others had just thought that the captain had died of some internal injury before they'd gone back down there. And she'd never told anyone else. She'd carried it in her heart for years and now...hearing that Verge, Verge who had helped take down ADVENT from the inside, admired _her_ for it....

Verge moved, and even though she wasn't looking at him, she knew he was picking up one of the blankets that had fallen to the floor. He sat on the bunk next to her and wrapped the blanket around her shoulders. "You are a good person."

She didn't really believe that. But it was good to hear, nonetheless. Just like it was good to have him there. Just like it was good that it was dark and she could lean over a bit, resting her forehead on his shoulder without it being a big deal. Just like it was good how he straightened the blanket around her and just kind of left his arms around her. Not a hug, really, definitely not.

 _No, of course not,_ Verge said. 

"I hate you a lot," she murmured into his shoulder.

_I don't believe you._

"Because you're reading my mind," she murmured. 

_Yes._

\-------

The next day, despite any fears Terminal might have had that things would Get Weird, they were remarkably not. Verge was up meditating on one of the top bunks by the time she woke. He nodded to her, she said "Hey" to him, and they went on with their day.

She appreciated that about Verge: he got her.

That morning, the link was noticeably less loud, and there was a significant reduction in blinding headache, which was another step in the right direction. They celebrated by walking through eight inches of snow to the diner down the street for breakfast ("Oh ho, you DO wear shoes!" "When it is below freezing and wet, yes." "Aaaw, do your widdle sectoid tootsie wootsies get cowd?" "...if I say yes will you promise to never use that voice again?") Terminal introduced Verge to what bacon and sausage tasted like. He was incredibly jealous.

That afternoon, Patchwork came marching into the barracks with her arms full of dormant GREMLIN and declared to Terminal, "You need to change your GREMLIN's name. Because obviously, he's possessed. I have calibrated his entire stabilizer array _three times_ , and he won't save the settings."

Terminal looked up from the incredibly boring datapad she was pretending to read and shook her finger at Spike. "Dude. Quit giving Patches trouble, or no cookies after midnight for you."

"He just misses his mommy," Patchwork said, setting Spike on a crate and pulling up her wrist interface.

Terminal opened the error logs Patches sent and sighed. "Let me take a look.... Spike, we've had this conversation. You need to be more independent!"

"Don't tell him that!" Patchwork said, putting her hands over Spike's "ears". "He'll be like those mechs over in City 5 that gained self-awareness!"

"Well, if he does, maybe I can have him do my paperwork."

Bludgeoning Spike's bugs back into submission took most of the day, and Terminal went to bed still thinking of GREMLIN wiring schematics, but that night there were no nightmares, just normal dreams: Patchwork and Spike in some kind of action movie, Verge buried in puppies, and a long walk through the snow in a city that was and was not City 31.

The day after that, around noon, Verge did a few more tests that consisted of him...thinking hard at Terminal and her not hearing it at all. Then he sat back and declared their little problem fixed.

Terminal wasn't sure how she felt about that. Relieved, of course, but also...it was very quiet. 

Terminal told Verge that they should be extra cautious about their recovery. "All I'm saying is, maybe we should take the rest of the day to recover. Recuperate. From our...ordeal."

"Our 'ordeal'," Verge deadpanned, lips twitching.

"Yes." Terminal pressed two fingers to the pulse in her neck. "I dunno, seems fast. Obviously, I'm still under stress and need to rest." She reached across the table, and did the same to Verge. "...okay, that actually is too fast for you. Do you still have a headache?"

"...yes."

"Well, then as your medic, I pronounce you overworked and not fit for duty."

For a second, it looked as if Verge would protest, but his sense of propriety didn't last long against her stern look. Or, more likely, he really was that tired.

Either way, Terminal took it as a victory. "I prescribe rest and recovery. For the rest of the day, at least. And a whole evening of not having to do a damn thing."

"...if you insist."

\-------

"Recovery" happened to involve a few more games of Jenga. Terminal won three out of four.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally this story was to be more about Verge's particular backstory and trauma, but then I ran out of time and so Verge's issues (which are, of course, more multifaceted than just what Terminal saw here) will have to wait.
> 
> Also, I totally just gave Terminal a random name. I can't find anything on her that suggests an ethnic origin, but in my head her family was mixed-race, with Japanese and other ancestries. (Her full name might be Kimiko, but she will never admit to/use it.)
> 
> If you would like a bit of Verge/Terminal shippiness for your ending, please read on to the Epilogue!


	2. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A month after what Terminal insists on referring to as The Psychic Acid Bomb Incident, she's got a question for Verge.
> 
> (An optional additional ending for the story, which tips this over into definite Verge/Terminal territory.)

A month after what Terminal insisted on calling The Psychic Acid Bomb Incident, Verge waited at the bus station outside the field office at the end of his shift. He paged idly through his newsfeeds, trying to keep the fluffy snow flurries from falling on his screen.

"Hey, Verge."

He looked up, blinking. Terminal was standing there, a bright rainbow knit cap on her head that looked suspiciously like Cherub's, and a black scarf wrapped so many times around her neck and lower face that he wondered if she could even turn her head. She did not like the cold. "Terminal." He raised a hand. "Have a good evening."

"Yeaaah, about that." She shoved her hands into her pockets, chest rising as if she was taking a deep breath. "I was wondering if you wanted to go get some dinner. There's this little neo-Asian place over by the docks that I hear has some great vege-toid options."

Verge blinked again. Then again. Terminal had never asked him to go to dinner before. Lunch, yes, the whole squad did that, but Terminal in particular was usually out the door with a cheery wave and not a backward glance as soon as her shift ended. Yet here she was, looking at him carefully, then away, then back to him, then away. Shifting from foot to foot, too. She was nervous, he realized.

For an oblivious second, he wondered what was wrong. Did she need backup for some reason? 

Then his common sense kicked in and he blinked yet again. "Dinner. With me?"

"...yeeep, that's what I asked."

Verge could think of at least three different ways that such an invitation could be meant. Asking for clarification might be seen as presumptuous, but Verge had always found that clarity was needed when human relationships were a factor. And he didn't want to risk harming his relationship with Terminal. "As...friends or as in...a date?"

Terminal rocked back on her heels, then onto her toes. "Let's see how the whole eating food together outside of work thing goes and decide later."

Verge narrowed his eyes. "That is not a terribly specific answer. So this... _could_ be considered a date?"

"Could. Maybe." Terminal said, shifting on her feet again and kicking at a clod of snow. "Doesn't have to be. The only questions on the table right now are 'do you want to go get food?' and 'do you trust my taste in dodgy streetside cafes?'"

Verge didn't for a moment think that those were the only questions on the table, but he was willing to let that pass. Terminal liked to hedge around emotional issues until she felt safe talking about them, and so long as they both knew that was what she was doing, Verge was fine with it. He dismissed his newsfeed reader and straightened from his lean against the bus shelter. "...how dodgy are we talking about?"

"A solid 6.5 on the Dodginess Scale. Dodgy enough that I don't eat anything that just lists 'meat' as an ingredient. Reputable enough that it's gotten raves from all my sectoid neighbors."

Hmm. That Terminal was paying attention to sectoid-friendly eateries was certainly an interesting piece of information. It also edged the marker slightly over into the "date" column.

As was the way she was radiating nervousness and hope so clearly that he could feel it without even needing to reach out.

Dating Terminal. This would no doubt be an adventure. 

Terminal shuffled her weight again, heaving a put-upon sigh. "Verge. You're overthinking this, and it's freezing out here. Food: yes/no?"

Verge was of the opinion that 90% of human issues were due to them _under_ thinking things, but he tactfully didn't say so, as the cautiousness/impulsivity axis was a particular worry of Terminal's. "Yes."

He could only see her smile in the way her eyes squinted shut. "Good!" she said, setting off down the street at a brisk pace. "C'mon, my car's over here."

At that moment the bus pulled up, but Verge just waved apologetically at the driver before following after Terminal. "You pre-empted me," he called out to her, after the bus had passed them.

"Hmm? What do you mean?"

"I was...thinking about you. Since the Incident."

"Oh, _really_?" She turned to look at him, still walking backward, her mouth now smiling above her scarf. "Thinking how?"

"Thinking of how strong and admirable and beautiful you are." And of how much he'd enjoyed feeling her curled against his side in the dark, but that wasn't talk for the open street.

She stopped dead in her tracks. "You...you just said that all out loud, huh?"

It was so easy to shock her with emotional honesty. "I did."

She looked pained. "Verge, you're doing this dating thing so wrong. There's supposed to be awkwardness and 'do they _like_ like me' and flirting and _then_ you pull out the com--"

At that point Verge caught up to her. He walked right into her personal space and wrapped his arms around her. With his height and reach, it was easy to do, bulky winter coats and all.

"-pliments," she finished, muffled in the front of his coat.

Verge rested his chin on the top of her head. "Or," he said, "we could do it this way." 

Terminal just stood there for a moment and then, slowly, the tension ran out of her. "Or we could do it this way," she said into his chest. "This way works."

 _Good,_ he thought. He was all for bypassing human courtship nonsense whenever possible in favor of actually building a relationship. 

And upon closer inspection, yes, she had most definitely stolen Cherub's hat for some reason. Verge made a mental note to find a rainbow knitted hat to gift her. Perhaps one that matched the beautiful kaleidoscopic shimmer of warm meta-colors and tones she was projecting at this very moment. 

Verge opened his arms slowly and eased back until he was just standing close.

She looked up at him, eyes soft and surprised, and he thought, _There. There is Miko._

Then a snowflake fell on her nose and she blinked and shivered and said, "Food."

He nodded. "Food. Lead on."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Why yes, one of the things that Verge inadvertently learned during their time linked together was that Terminal appreciates a gentle and very confident top, why do you ask? ;P


End file.
